Parliament votes no to everything again.

No, No, No, No - the results of the indicative votes show that the House of Commons is again much better at showing what it is against than what it is for.

Here are the results of the indicative votes this evening:






































For the second time none of the "indicative votes" produced a majority and none of the four proposals received more votes than the Withdrawal Agreement.

If the events of the past few months at Westminster had not yet happened and someone wrote a political novel describing the same set of events, the critics would condemn it as completely implausible.

MPs have had the opportunity not just to vote in principle that they don't want a "No Deal" Brexit but to actually take it off the table: they could do that by in a number of ways, such as by passing the  withdrawal agreement. They have taken several votes which indicate that in principle they don't want a "no deal" Brexit but they have passed up multiple opportunities to actually take it off the table.

MPs have also had several opportunities to vote to leave the European Union and have not taken any of them,

Part of the problem is that everyone is hoping that someone else will compromise.

The real irony is that :
  • First of all supporters of a hard Brexit appeared to have put the government in a position that it could not get any form of Brexit through and made a long delay, a very soft Brexit or no Brexit at all seem likely, but then
  • This evening supporters of various flavours of soft Brexit or Remain proved just as unwilling to compromise and rescued the prospect of a no-deal Brexit from the dead.

It is looking increasingly likely that whatever outcomes Britain and the EU end up with, some of the very people who were most opposed to those outcomes will have helped bring about the very results they proclaimed they were trying to prevent.
  1. If we end up with a "No deal" Brexit those who want a soft Brexit, long delay or not to leave the EU at all who refused to compromise this evening will bear part of the responsibility for that outcome.
  2. If we end up with "No Deal" the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, will also have helped to cause that outcome. Dan O'Brien made a convincing argument in December in the Irish Independent that 'The backstop demand could end up bringing about that which it was designed to prevent,' and that by persuading the EU to make demands which appear to be unable to pass the house of Commons the Irish leader risked both causing a "No Deal" Brexit and damaging relations between Britain and Ireland. That warning appears to be in great danger of coming true.
  3. By the same token, if we end up with a situation where Brexit is drastically watered down, delayed for a long time, or never happens at all, those members of the supposedly pro-Brexit European Reform Group who have three times refused to support the Brexit deal which was on the table will have helped to stop or soften Brexit. But for them we would be out of the EU by now. And
  4. Everything the Democratic Unionist Party has done has been intended to protect the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland but their manner of doing so has been unfortunate (I am wording that very carefully) and I think they are taking a serious risk of damaging the union.

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